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base wretch who can use his cruelty as the tool of his greed, and whose cruelty itself is so unredeemed by any resistance or stimu

ed to pronounce her genius more powerful, her promise more rich, even than those of her gifted sister, Charlotte. For receiving this avowal, the reader will be somewhat prepar-lant, as to expend itself on a dying son or a ed, by perusing the following sentences from the biographic notice, brief, but of thrilling interest, of her two sisters, given to the world by Currer Bell :-"My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deepbranded in my memory; but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health."

The picture thus vividly drawn of a frail form standing up undaunted in the scowl of death, should be kept before us as we turn to the work left us by Ellis Bell. It were a strange and surely a distempered criticism which hesitated to pass sentence of condemnation on " Wuthering Heights." We have no such hesitation. Canons of art sound and imperative, true tastes and natural instincts, of which these canons are the expression, unite in pronouncing it unquestionably and irremediably monstrous. If there is any truth or indication of truth in all that the most artistic of nations alleged concerning the line of beauty, if it is true that in every work of art, however displayed, we must meet the proofs of moderation, of calmness, of tempered and mastered power, if it is a reasonable demand that the instances of nature's abortion, from which we would turn away in the street, that objects and incidents which awake no higher emotion than abhorrent disgust, be honored with no embalming rites, but left to be taken out of our sight, like dead dogs and carrion, by that nature which ever perpetuates what is gross or noisome, this work must be condemned. On the dark brow and iron cheek of Heathcliff, there are touches of the Miltonic fiend; but we shrink in mere loathing, in "unequivocal contempt," from the

girl's poodle. There are things which the pen of history cannot be required to do more than touch on and pass by; we desire not admittance into the recesses of the palace of Sujah Dowlah, we will not penetrate the pri vacy of the Cæsars; and if the historic artist must at times show us the darkest evil, that we may avoid it, or sweep it from the earth, neither his nor any other art can altogether forego the glorious privilege of washing its creations in pure water, and shunning, at least, the foul and offensive. The whole atmosphere, too, of this fiction is distempered, disturbed, and unnatural; fever and malaria are in the air; the emotions and the crimes are on the scale of madness, and, as if earthly beings, and feelings called terrestrial, were not of potency sufficient to carry on this exciting drama, there are dangerous, very ghostly personages, of the spectral order, introduced, and communings held with the spirit world which would go far to prove Yorkshire the original locality of spirit-rapping. All this is true, and no reader of the book will deem our mode of expressing it severe; yet we have perfect confidence in pointing to "Wuthering Heights" as a work which contains evidence of powers it were perhaps impossible to estimate, and wealth it were vain to compute. A host of Titans would make wild work, if directed by a child to overturn the mountains; a host of dwarfs would do little good or harm in any case; but bring your Titans under due command, set over them a judgment that can discern and command, and hill will rise swiftly over hill, till the pyramid is scaling the sky. The powers manifested in this strange book seem to us comparable to such a Titan host, and we know no task beyond their might, had they been ruled by a severe taste and discriminating judgment. The very ability to conceive and project, with such vivid boldness, that wild group of characters, the unmeasured distance into which recedes all that is conventional, customary, or sentimental, the tremendous strength and maturity of the style, would be enough to justify our words. The very absurdities and exaggerations of the construction and characters lend their testimony here. Not for a moment, with such materials, could the aim of art be attained, could belief, in some sense and for some space, be produced, save by commanding powers. It may be the wild and haggard

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beings suffer pain; the great agony of pasof sympathy which linked him to his kind, sion has burned out of his bosom the chords and left him in that ghastly and fiendish solitude, which it is awful to dream of as a possible element in the punishment of hell. However frightful the love scenes in the death-chamber of Cathy (and we suppose there is nothing at all similar to these in the range of literature), we feel that we are in the presence of a man; when we think on his early roamings with his lost and dying love on the wild moors, we can even perceive, stealing over the heart, a faint breath of sympathy; but when he leaves the world of his thy, whether as a breathing woman, or as the real existence-the world of his love for Cawraith which he still loves on-we shrink from him as from a corpse, made more ghast

pageantry of a dream at which we gaze, but | all sensibility, to be unconscious that human it is a dream we can never forget; and though the dissent and negation of our reason are, when we pause, explicit, yet we no sooner resign ourself to the spell of the magician, than we feel powerless to disbelieve; in the strength of the assertion, we overlook its absurdity. Touching the character of Heathcliff, moreover, and with less expressness, of that of Cathy Earnshaw, we have a remark to make, which we would extend to certain of the characters of Currer Bell, and which might, we think, go far to point out a psychological defence, to be urged with some plausi bility, of much that is extravagant and revolting in either case. The power over the mind of what Mr. Carlyle calls "fixed idea," is well known; the possession of the whole soul by one belief or aim produces strange and unaccountable effects, co-mingling strength and weakness, kindness and cruelty, and seem-ly ing, at least at first sight, to compromise the very unity of nature. Ellis Bell, in "Wuthering Heights," deals with a kindred, though somewhat different phenomenon; she deals not with intellect, but emotion; she paints the effects of one overmastering feeling, the maniac actings of him who has quaffed one draught of maddening passion; and the passion she has chosen is love. There is still a gleam of nobleness, of natural human affection, in the heart of Heathcliff in the days of his early love for Cathy, when he rushes so manfully at the bull-dog which has seized her, and after she is safe in Thrushcross Grange, sets himself again on the windowledge to watch how matters go on, "because," says he, "if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million fragments, unless they let her out;" but we watch that same boyish heart, until, in the furnace of hopeless and agonizing passion, it becomes as insensible to any tender emotion, or indeed any emotion save one, as a mass of glowing iron to a drop of dew. Heathcliff's original nature is seen only in the outgoing of his love towards Cathy; there alone he is human, if he is frenzied; in all other cases he is a fiend. As his nature was never good, as there were always in it the hidden elements of the sneak and the butcher, the whole of that semi-vital life which he retains towards the rest of the world is ignoble and revolting. His sorrow has been to him moral death; with truly diabolic uniformity, every exercise of power possible to him upon any creature, rational or irrational (Cathy, of course, excepted), is made for its torment. He seems in one-half of his nature to have lost

by the hideous movements of galvanism.
Somewhat different is the effect of the same
passion upon Cathy. Hers was originally a
brave, and beautiful, and essentially noble na-
ture; through all her waywardness, we can
love her still; and though her love for Heath-
cliff costs her her life, it never scathes and
To the last, her heart and imagination can
sears her soul into a calcined crag like his.
bear her to the wild flowers she used to
gather amid the heath; strange and wraith-
like as she grows in the storm of that resistless
passion, we know full well that no mean, or
cruel, or unwomanly thought could enter her
breast. Viewed as a psychological study of
this sort, a defence might, we say, be set up
for the choice of these two characters; and
when thus confessedly morbid, their handling
will be allowed to be masterly. Nor can it
be alleged that instances of similar passion,
attended by like results, are not to be met
with in real life. Madness, idiocy, and death,
are acknowledged to follow misguided or hope-
less affection; in the case both of Cathy and
Heathcliff, there was unquestionably a degree
of the first; only, we submit that bedlam is
no legitimate sphere of art.
however, there can be no doubt: the girl's
Of one thing,
hand which drew Heathcliff and Cathy, which
agony on cheek and brow, and never for a
never shook as it brought out those lines of
ish or bravura, was
moment lost its strength and sweep in flour-
wielded either pen or pencil.
such as has seldom

variety of power displayed in this extraor-
We might descant at great length on the
dinary book; but we should leave it without
conveying an idea, even partially correct, of
its general character, if we omitted to notice

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1855.]

CURRER BELL.

411

those touches of nature's softest beauty, I cadence, that power of melody, which, be it
wild, or tender, or even at times harsh, we
those tones of nature's softest melody, which
never heard before, and know to come at first
are blended, so cunningly as to excite no
sense of discord, with its general excitement hand from nature, as her sign of the born
and gloom. We cannot forbear quoting here poet. We have not minutely compared the
a passage which seems to us deeply suggest poetry of the three sisters; but, in spite of a
ive; the speaker is a young girl, and he of prevailing opinion to the contrary, we scruple
not to declare, that the clear result of what
whom she speaks a boy about her own age:-
examination we have made is the conclusion,
that Ellis Bell's is beyond measure the best.

:

"One time, however, we were near quarrelling. He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his perfect idea of heaven's happiness. Mine was, rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright, white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos, pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool, dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods, and sounding water, and the whole world awake He wanted all to lie in and wild with joy. an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee."

Does this not bear witness to much? None but the youthful sympathy of a green heart could have won access to that child's heaven; none but a free, and elastic, and loving nature could thus, with the inimitable touch of truth and reality, have heard, through the ear of that glad girl, in the joy-toned anthem of bird, and water, and rustling branch, the very music of heaven; while the faithfulness of the picture, the perfect and effortless realization of the whole summer scene, so that we hear that west wind, and see those bright white clouds-the cumulous clouds which, the summer long, are the flocks of the west wind and scent that bloom of the warm, waving heather, is demonstration absolutely sufficient of that inborn love of nature's joy and beauty which never yet dwelt in a narrow or unworthy breast. This little extract, too, is sufficient to prove maturity and excellence of style. There is a free, strong, graceful force in every line; there is no dallying, no second touch; the little scene groups itself gracefully together as if to that summer music.

We have already lingered too long with Ellis Bell. We make no more than an allusion to her poetry. It is characterized by strength and freshness, and by that original

But, after all, we must pronounce what has been left us by this wonderful woman, unhealthy, immature, and worthy of being "Wuthering Heights" belongs to avoided. the horror school of fiction, and is involved in its unequivocal and unexcepting condemnation. We say not that a mind, inured to the task, cannot, by careful scrutiny and severe discrimination, derive valuable hints and important exercise from such works; we may trace and emulate the strength of touch and the richness of color, while we detest the subject; we may listen to the snatches of woodland music, and thrill to every tint of woodland beauty, in the neighborhood of the hyena's den. But we do not for this recall our condemnation. At the foot of the gallows, touches of nature's tenderness may be marked: in the pallid face of the criminal we may note workings of emotion not to be seen elsewhere; and anatomy might be studied, with both novelty and force of instruction, in the quivering of the muscles and wrenching of the forehead of one who lay on the wheel; but it admits not of question, that the general effect of such spectatles is brutalizing, and we would therefore, without hesitation, terminate their publicity. On exactly the same grounds, would we bid our readers avoid works of distempered excitement; even when such are of the highest excellence in their class, as those of Ellis Bell and Edgar Poe, we would deliberately sentence them to oblivion: their general effect is to produce a mental state alien to the calm energy and quiet homely feelings of real life, to make the soul the slave of stimulants, and these of the fiercest kind, and, whatever irritability may for the time be fostered, to shrivel and dry up those sympathies which are the most tender, delicate, and precious. Works like those of Edgar Poe and this "Wuthering Heights" must be plainly declared to blunt, to brutalize, and to enervate the mind. Of the poetry, also, of Ellis Bell, it must be said that it is not healthful; that its beauty is allied to that wild loveliness which may gleam on the hectic cheek, or move while it startles, as we listen to maniac ravings. And

wherefore this unchanging wail, whence this greatest trial, and must bear testimony to perpetual and inexpressible melancholy, in the calm triumph with which they brought the poems of one so young? What destiny her through." She died May 28, 1849. is it with which this young heart so vainly The last lines written by Acton Bell are so struggles, and by which it is overcome? Is full of pathos, awaken a sorrow so holy and ennobling, and breathe a faith so strong and tranquil, that we cannot pass them by :

it possible that under the sunny azure of an English sky, and while the foot is on English moors, so utter a sadness may descend on a girl, whom we expect to find "a metaphor of spring, and mirth, and gladness," the sister of the fawn and the linnet? The spectacle is deeply touching, and alas! the explanation is at hand; an explanation which, while it leaves untouched the assertion that the beauty of these poems is that of the blighted flower, changes every feeling with which we might momentarily regard their author into pitying sorrow. Her genius was yoked with. death; it never freed itself from the dire companionship, never rose into freedom and clearness as in the old Platonic chariot, her soul, borne by her winged genius, rose strong and daring towards the empyrean, but ere it breathed the pure serene, that black steed, which was also yoked indissolubly to the car, dragged her downwards even to the grave. Her poetry, whatever tones of true and joyful lyric music it may at intervals afford, is, as a whole, but the wild wailing melody to which was fought the battle between genius and death.

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Of Anne Bronté, known as Acton Bell, have scarce a remark to make. In her life, too, sadness was the reigning element, but she possessed no such strong genius as her sister. "Anne's character," says Currer Bell, was more subdued; she wanted the power, the fire, the originality of her sister, but was well endowed with quiet virtues of her own. Long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted." Her death is thus recorded by the same authority:-" She (Ellis) was not buried ere Anne fell ill. She had not been committed to the grave a fortnight, before we received distinct intimation that it was necessary to prepare our minds to see the younger sister go after the elder. Accordingly, she followed in the same path, with slower step, and with a patience that equalled the other's fortitude. I have said that she was religious, and it was by leaning on those Christian doctrines in which she firmly believed, that she found support through her most painful journey. I witnessed their efficacy in her latest hour and

"I hoped, that with the brave and strong,
My portion'd task might lie;
To toil amid the busy throng,
With purpose pure and high.

But God has fix'd another part,

And he has fixed it well:
I said so with my bleeding heart,
When first the anguish fell.

Thou, God, hast taken our delight,
Our treasured hope away;
Thou bidd'st us now weep through the night,
And sorrow through the day.

These weary hours will not be lost,
These days of misery,
These nights of darkness, anguish-tost,
Can I but turn to thee:

With secret labor to sustain

In humble patience every blow; To gather fortitude from pain,

And hope and holiness from woe.

Thus let me serve thee from my heart,
Whate'er may be my written fate;
Whether thus early to depart,
Or yet awhile to wait.

If thou should'st bring me back to life,
More humbled I should be;

More wise-more strengthened for the strife,
More apt to lean on thee.

Should death be standing at the gate,

Thus should I keep my vow;
But, Lord! whatever be my fate,

Oh, let me serve thee now!"

"These lines written," adds Currer Bell, "the desk was closed, the pen laid aside, forever."

It may well be doubted whether any more, than a faint and mournful reminiscence of Ellis and Acton Bell will survive the generation now passing away; but the case is widely different with the eldest of the sisters. Currer Bell has won for herself a place in our literature from which she cannot be deposed; her influence will long be felt, as a strong plastic energy, in the literature of Britain and the world; the language of England will retain a trace of her genius. We have no intention, at present, to subject her works to a detailed criticism; we pur

pose merely to wander once again over certain of those pleasant places whither her genius first led us, and listening to her words as those of one who scrupled not to assume the tone of a censor of her age, and considered every word she penned matter of scientious regard, to endeavor to define, briefly and articulately, the worth of her teaching.

affords with the perils which may beset our private walk, and to learn how the problems of life have already been solved. The novelist ought to be the recorder of Providence in domestic life-the historian of the fireside con--the teacher of the family; and if this great truth were once recognized, we should look with hope for the emergence of a literature, in form and name, for good and obvious reasons, fictitious, but in reality true, and both an honor and a blessing to the nation. We ask not for religious novels alone, any more than we ask merely for ecclesiastical history; the religious life would indeed have its place-a prominent and honored placeand one which it has never yet occupied: but our demand is simply truth; and if we have truth, we fear not for goodness. We demand that the bonds of conventionality, which have crushed the heart out of domestic history, be broken and cast aside, and that the infinity of nature, manifested here as elsewhere, be not narrowed into one unvarying line, which we can soon trace with our eyes shut; that the real emotions of nature, the true tears and laughter of birthday, of bridal, and of funeral procession, be not vaporized into sickly fancies and feeble sentimentalities, and that we be not perpetually, after a few hackneyed windings, conducted to the same goal. The plots of that history which is distinguished from history proper in that, be its characters who they may, they are treated of in their domestic relations, are as varied as the plots which evolve themselves on the stage of the world; and the true historian in this province, the novelist worthy of honor, will learn to look with as perfect independence and contempt upon the old conventional framework of fiction, as his brother of the more honored, if not higher school, might exhibit when ad

One word may not be superfluous as to the form of her works. We view the novel in one principal aspect--as allied to, and contrasted with, history. The history of a nation of which we as yet know nothing, is to us a novel on a grand scale; it has its incidents more stirring than imagination ever painted, its characters more startling and inexplicable, its plot more dark and undiscoverable; and the historian, who is a true artist, will lead us, in earnest curiosity, along the path of Providence, and by no anachronism of anticipation or disclosure will blunt the feelings of wonder and admiration with which, at the right moment, we behold the curtain rise. The novel is the history of domestic life, and if written with resolute regard to its nature and theme, may be of truth equal to that of history. Nay, we deem it undeniable, that when thus rigorously considered, the novel is a species of composition which cannot, and ought not to be dispensed with. The great lessons for which Providence finds a voice in the warlike contendings or peaceful labors of nations, in their growth and decline, in their birth, glory, and death, we all own it our duty to regard; were they unheeded, we feel that one most important portion of that grand system of education to which we formerly alluded, were omitted; and accordingly, with universal consent, we proclaim the task of the historian at once solemn and sublime. But Providence has another stage, where instruc-vised to embody his historic creations in the tions, also of plain and undeniable importance, are administered to men. In domestic life, at the altar and at the death-bed, in the festal assemblage and by the household hearth, the steps of Providence are to be traced; warnings, examples, encouragements, intimations, which, if known and prized, might be more precious to us than rubies, are ever afforded in the common course of life; and if it is right to strengthen and widen our powers of intellectual vision, by watching the dealings of Providence with other nations besides our own, it is assuredly right to extend our knowledge of domestic life beyond the bounds of our own experience, to gain a wider acquaintance than our own circle

stiff hieroglyphics of Egypt or Nineveh, or in the feather-pictures of Mexico. We are well aware that questions of no slight difficulty would present themselves in an exhaustive treatment of this subject; questions as to the limits of the imaginative and the strictly historic, questions as to the precise nature of the sympathies to which the novelist, in quest of that popularity which, in one sort or other, is indispensable to every literary work, makes legitimate appeal, questions as to that suspicious word and thing, amusement, and its perilous association with instruction, and a great many questions besides. But that we have defined the novel in its primary and central aspect, and that we

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